Norma McCorvey: Jane Roe's Reversal and the Paid Performance Claim

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In 1969 Norma McCorvey was 21, broke, and pregnant with her third child in Dallas, where abortion was banned except to save the mother's life. Attorneys Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee needed a plaintiff with standing, and McCorvey signed an affidavit under the pseudonym Jane Roe, but she gave birth in June 1970 and the child was placed for adoption long before any ruling. The episode, which sets out to take no side on the abortion debate, explains how the Supreme Court kept the case alive under the mootness exception for situations capable of repetition yet evading review, and how Justice Harry Blackmun, after researching at the Mayo Clinic, wrote the 7 to 2 opinion of January 1973 grounding a right to privacy in the 14th Amendment and dividing pregnancy into trimesters around viability.

McCorvey learned of the decision from a newspaper and never attended the arguments. After her identity became public she worked with the abortion rights movement, while privately describing recurring nightmares and later saying her lawyers had kept her uninformed. In 1995 she joined the anti-abortion movement and was baptized on national television, testified to Congress in 1998, and in 2003 tried to reopen her case, a motion courts rejected as moot. Shortly before her death in 2017 she told a documentary camera that her anti-abortion work had been a paid act. Former activist Rob Schenck said the movement had enticed her with money, while Father Frank Pavone insisted she stayed opposed to abortion until the end.

• Texas argued the case was moot because McCorvey was no longer pregnant.
• Under the trimester framework, first trimester decisions were left to the woman and her doctor, and states could regulate in the second to protect maternal health.
• After viability the Court allowed states to ban abortion except where the mother's life or health was at risk.
• In her 1998 congressional testimony McCorvey accused her former lawyers of fabricating a constitutional right.
• Her 2003 motion cited new beliefs and what she called new evidence of psychological harm to women.